Clemens

David Foster Wallace appeared on my radar when "Infinite Jest" was all over the internet as the best Sci-Fi novel you have to read, while reading it the parts where he wrote about the Tennis where absolute fascinating. A friend of mine told me I should try to read this.

Well many years have passed and I finally read it and it was so amazing, especially for me who was a huge Tennis fan back in the '90s this is all so amazing. The writing is great (be aware of many many foot notes) and it was all over too soon.

Would I recommend this, hell yeah, those short stories are amazing!

I haven't been that wowed by some classical sci-fi book in a long time. This book was really good, just overall really good. I now understand how Dune has such a big fan group. The only Dune I knew before this was the David Lynch movie and it was fantastic abstract. And this book is just so amazing ... and now I want to see Dune again ...

I read Book 3 before reading Book 2 and I never realized I read the last part because it was so boring. So horrible boring. Just one thing popped up and I was like “when did that happen” but the rest. Boring. Nothing happens. The ending is so … boring that I still thought I am in book 2 and then we get to the good end. But there is no good end. It is just so boring and horrible.

Just don’t bother, read something else.

I read the second book after the third book because while reading the third book I never realized it was the third book because it was so flat and boring and nothing happened.

Now after reading the second book it feels more like the third book in progress and happening and I would be even more pissed off if I would have read that in order.

Still this book is just flat and boring and horrible like the other two. The main character is this all good all can do everybody thinks he can solve the universe person that you just start to hate really well really soon.

It feels like some horrible teenage fantasy novel that should have never been published.

Don‘t read one of those books. Ever.

Like there are good B Movies there are good B Books. And this is one of them. But after all I can't give it more than three stars. Nice story, nice characters, but overall not much depth to it.

Lose zusammenhängende Geschichten von einem Russen in Berlin. Nicht unbedingt schlecht geschrieben, aber auch nicht etwas was einem vom Sessel reisst.

Wow, I am really surprised, what an awesome book. Very well written, and it seems very well translated too. Will start reading other books from this author and series soon!

Clishe and not really so interesting. Too “american” for me.

I really like this one. After I read the first book Raymond Chandler wrote, I was not sure if I would want to read any other one. Too many old clichés and it felt more like reading a really bad pulp story.

But this one changes it, this is a really great story, well written, well told.

[Doesn't change the fact that every body smokes, and there isn't a page where there is nobody smoking ;)]

Not as good as the second one. While not bad in general, it was just on and off a bit confusing.

A very enjoy full read. Gripping from the first page to the last, well written and even though it was written quite some time ago, it didn't loose any of it over the years.

The move is very close to this book and I can also recommend that one too.

A surprising well written book and with a surprising well done story that actually makes sense and does not pull out stuff from a magic hat to fit its purpose.

Solid read with some very interesting parts in the middle. Better than I could have ever expected from a Star Trek Universe Novel.

What a strange collection. So there are three books which I would divide into one and the second and third as one book together.

While the first was all together not that bad and interesting to read, it still was borderline stupid from time to time.

Sadly the other two books are just one cliché next to another one and I was glad once I was done.

Altogether I give it a three star rating, but it just barely reaches it. Not really highly recommended. And if, then just read the first book and don't bother with the other two.

The counter book to “Nothing new on the western front”. An extremely impressive first person view of the war by someone who was enthralled by the war in itself and still saw death and destruction everywhere.

I really highly recommend this book to everyone, BUT it is really necessary to also read “Nothing new on the western front” to get both views.

Wonderful short stories, a pleasure to read. And some of them will really move you deeply. Highly recommended.

Since I read another Kafka book in schools this is my second Kafka I read. And I am very impressed. The wonderful german and the very strange and amazing story is just two wonderful things that make this book really amazing. Highly recommended.

The first Hemingway I read and it has to be about WWI. Well, besides this, it didn't really impact me a lot. Some parts were written very well, other parts felt like a big page filler. Overall it felt like a good book, but not more than that. Still, it gave me an interesting in reading more from Hemingway, so from this point of view not all was lost.

I think I am not a big fan of the way Ernest Hemingway writes, but I do truly enjoy what he writes in this book. Fantastic stories about his time in Paris and about all those artists he meets there. Really highly recommend it.

Another amazing Kafkaesk story. I really love this style of literature and should read more of this in between my “other” books

One of those capital “B” books that. Written in one of the most wonderful german you can imagine, it is a story about a family over a view generations and their slow downfall.

Even the most dullest scenes are written in a way that you just cannot skip them and other scenes are written in such an amazing way that you can actually feel it.

From all the “Culture” novels I have read, I think this is the weakest. I just couldn't get into the story. While there were interesting parts, there seemed to be way too much text without a story and too many loose ends and side stories that really didn't move the main story forward.

Some parts were interesting in deepening the main Culture lore, but not enough to somehow enjoy this book at full.

As all the books are pretty much stand alone, at the current point I would skip it.

I have no idea if I even understood what was going on in this book, but I enjoyed it. It was truly strange and abstract and sometimes hard to follow, but it was great.

There is not much more to say, just that this is a book very hard to recommend. If you enjoyed books like Catch 22 or Gravity Rainbow, then yeah, this could be worth reading, else, no.

The New Testament to the Old Testament. And like the New Testament it is much shorter and easier to read as you get all the basic science out of the way.

An amazing delve into years post second World War and how the Russians came to their first nuclear bomb and the development of the thermonuclear bomb and critical events around this time.

Fascinating and amazing, really highly recommended.

A very good book, a very interesting book, but also a book that has some parts that are really really really hard to read because it is written in like “spoken slang” english. Like u hav 2 imagin tis is ritten like tis and @ ti moment u get so confused abut tis.

Yeah, hard to read, especially if you are not a native reader.

Anyway, would still recommend to read :D